1 The Intruder

As I walked, in an aimless way, down the dusky street the lights from the windows of the houses, set back in the lawns, and the darker shadows of the trees played shutter-wise before my eyes, the alternate gleam and blackness confusing me, and acting upon my nerves, in such fashion, that I was in a state to quarrel with any one whom I might meet.

I admit freely—why should I not, knowing all it cost me?—that I was not in the condition, rightly associated with the name of gentleman, and the blame was wholly mine. It was no stress of fortune, no injustice from others, but merely my own hot blood and lack of restraint upon self, lack even of the desire for such restraint that had driven me into a life, at the memory of which I still feel shame, despite all that has passed since then. I make this confession gladly, and, even were I not willing, I could not do otherwise, because there is no excuse.

It is a gross appetite, the one that wants liquid stimulants, but I had taken more at the hotel than was good for either my mind or my manners, and now this city of Louisville, that I had known of old, was dancing about in a rakish fashion, that half amused, half annoyed me. It was late, far into the evening, as I wandered out the beautiful residence street, and few people passed, none taking notice of me, at which I felt a certain irritation, because I was a person of some importance and it was not fitting that I should be ignored wholly by the world.

Despite my ill humor the city was beautiful in the moonlight, its silver rays softening the walls of brick and stone, and falling in spangles on the lawns. Down the street a policeman whistled softly to keep himself company, and I began to feel like the policeman, unnoticed and lonely, until I had a happy thought. Alicia, little Alicia, with whom I had played at school, and who had been my childish sweetheart, came suddenly into my mind. She lived here on this very street, Third Avenue, and I remembered the number. A year before in the West I had received one of her wedding invitations, forwarded from several addresses, and a little later on an “At Home” card came too. I had felt a vague resentment that the girl whom I liked best in my childhood had given herself to another man, but it quickly passed, because my life then was not such as to cherish the memory of her pure face and shy ways.

Little Alicia! What a loyal, brave child she was! as enduring as a boy, with a boy’s sense of honor, which may be no better than a girl’s sense of honor, but which is different. I could not picture her except as a girl of twelve or thirteen in a short dress, with a great coil of glossy brown hair down her back, and a pair of the finest dark blue eyes that I have ever seen, twinkling with fun, and then shadowed with childish appeal. She could not be twenty now, and whatever she might have become to others she was the same little playmate to me.

I looked up at the numbers and I saw that her house was two or three blocks farther on. The man she had married was named Grey. I had seen it on the wedding invitation. I knew nothing about him, but he would have to be a good fellow to be worthy of Alicia, my little Alicia, as I had often called her when she was twelve.

I had a great feeling of loneliness, I was aggrieved at the way in which I walked through the metropolis of my own State, no one taking notice. Ah, but I had one friend, Alicia! I would go to see her now, talk with her of the old days, and we would laugh over them together. Here was the number. And the house, a fine, large red brick building, stood back a little way on the lawn, a light shining from the front window and casting long bands of yellow flame across the green grass. It was an attractive place, with an air of comfort and wealth, and this man Grey was evidently able to put such a jewel as Alicia in a good setting.

I paused a moment, with my hand on the bronze gate, and wondered how Alicia would receive me. That she would be glad I felt no doubt, and I was sure also of her surprise. It would perhaps startle, her a little to see her old comrade, Harry Clarke, from whom she had not heard in so long, walking into her house, but on that account the pleasure should be all the greater.

I steadied myself, opened the bronze gate, and passed upon the lawn. The lights of the city still danced about in their old, rakish fashion; but now I felt exhilaration instead of annoyance. Let them dance! I too, could dance to the same tune.

I walked to the door and pulled the bell. A distant echo from the interior of the house came back to me, showing that it had been silent within; it was silent without too; I could not see a living being anywhere, and the sound of the policeman’s whistle no longer reached me. Across the street all the lights that had shone from the windows, as I strolled along, were gone out now, and the town was lighted only by the moon and the electric lamps at the corners.

No answer came to the sound of the bell, and growing impatient I pulled it again, the faint echo of the ring returning as before from within, and hard upon it the sound of light footsteps in the hall as they approached the door. My annoyance quickly passed. I should now see the little Alicia who was like a dash of rosy color in a memory that held too many sorry things, and I smiled.

The door was opened and I pressed in at once, saying to the maid who had come:

“Tell Mrs. Grey that an old friend, one whom she cannot have forgotten, wishes to see her. Tell her it’s Harry Clarke.”

Impulsively I shut the door behind me, taking from the maid her task, and turned toward a parlor that I saw on the right, intending to wait there until Alicia should come.

“This is the place, is it not?” I said to the girl, but she did not reply, merely uttering a startled, choked little cry, and I looked at her, made curious by such odd behavior.

The only light in the hall came from a lamp, turned very low, and she who admitted me had stood in the shadow. Now I saw that she was no maid. She was not dressed like a servant, nor had she the manner and bearing of one.

A pair of dark blue eyes, of the blue so dark that it is almost black, gazed at me, eyes misty a little now with the dew of reproach. Heavy dark brown hair, that would be tinted here and there in the sunlight with gleams of the most marvelous red, were coiled loosely over a pure brow, and as the slender figure wavered a little and as the color fled from her cheeks and then came back again I knew that it was Alicia, my little Alicia, changed now into a wonderful woman.

“I—I thought it was George,” she said. “I wondered that he should ring when he had a key. I sent the maid to bed and I waited.”

Then she stopped short, and the color in her face suddenly became a flood. It seemed to me that she was speaking more to this George, who must be her husband, than to me, not yet realizing my presence, and that in a way she was making an excuse or an apology.

“Alicia,” I said, to reassure her, “it is I, Harry Clarke. Don’t you remember me? We were boy and girl sweethearts for years. Alicia, what a marvelous woman you’ve become!”

These were crude things to say, but I have told you I was not in my right state. I was perhaps dazed, as she certainly seemed to be; her beauty startled me, and the appealing look in her eyes that I knew so well of old found a response in what I think yet was my better nature.

“Harry! Harry Clarke!” she exclaimed, and unconsciously—I knew even then it was an impulse—she held out both her hands. I took them in mine and held them there a moment, feeling them warm but trembling in the pressure of my fingers.

I noticed the little parlor, faintly lighted by the lamp in the hall which stood near its door, and I turned to it again.

“Come, Alicia,” I said. “Let’s go in here and talk over the old times. It’s ages since I’ve seen you, and you can’t know how glad I am to find you again.”

She hesitated and looked fearfully toward the front door. I saw plainly a look of terror in her eyes, but such was my infatuated state then that I did not care for it, nor care to know why it was there. I almost swept her into the room, and sitting down in a chair, as if the house were my own, I said:

“Alicia, tell me that you are glad to see me.”

“I am, I am, Harry!” she cried, in tones of such intensity that now I was startled. “But, oh, Harry, why have you come here at this hour and as you are?”

The hour! I had taken no thought of time, but a large clock stood on the mantel over the gas logs in the hall, and from my chair I could see it. The hour hand had passed twelve, and then I remembered that it was not fitting to call at midnight on a lady—but Alicia and I had known each other all our lives, and it would be all right. My eyes came back to her face, and however my faculties may have been blunted otherwise I saw then with the knowledge of intuition that she was not a happy woman. Some bitter sorrow had left its mark there.

“Oh, Harry,” she exclaimed, in the same tones of intensity and alarm, “if you care for me at all, for the sake of the old days, if you respect me, if you wish me well, leave this house as soon as you can!”

I was startled now, God knows, and not without some share, too, of her alarm, and I began:

“Alicia, I didn’t think of the time. I——”

But she interrupted me with a little cry and sprang into the hall. I heard the front door opening, and saw a large, heavy man stalk in. “Stalk” is the only word that describes it, because his air was that of an overlord who exacts every privilege of his overlordship. His eyes were shot with red, his broad face was flushed —I knew why too well, and it was not for me at that time to criticise him.

“Alicia,” he said brutally, “I told you not to wait. There is no sense in it. I come home when I please!”

“George,” she said, and her frightened, pleading tones cut me to the quick, “I—I—there is——”

She stopped, not knowing what to say, and her eyes turned with involuntary motion toward the open door of the little parlor in which I sat. The eyes of the man followed hers, and I never before saw such a blaze of wrath appear upon a human being’s face. He had caught the outlines of my figure as I rose to my feet, and he stepped forward, pressing the electric button in the wall and flooding the parlor with light from the chandelier overhead. I stood squarely in the centre of the glow. He turned upon the frightened girl with a savage exclamation.

“Ah, Madame!” he said, and his tones were so savage, so full of insinuation, that I could have killed him where he stood, “I know why you are up! You did not expect me so soon! But you are clumsy about it, like a novice!”

I was appalled—not for myself, but for her. Yet the stroke, as if by a lightning flash, cleared away the mists and fogs from my brain, and I saw in all its terrible truth the fate that I had brought upon little Alicia. Her husband, brutal, domineering, flushed with liquor, perhaps by nature insanely jealous, would not believe a word that we might say, and, apparently, he had little cause to believe them. Alicia’s pathetic eyes shifted from her husband’s to mine, and I felt one of those desperate impulses that come sometimes to men in great straits. I edged toward a little table, until I stood between it and the door.

The man laughed, and the laugh was at once savage and cynical.

“Alicia,” he said, “I would not have believed it of you, and you such a little innocent, if my eyes did not tell me it was so.”

“George! George!” she said, “you are hasty, you——”

But he interrupted her mercilessly.

“Let’s see who our fine young gentleman is,” he said. “Ah, a stranger! But it’s your last visit here, my man.”

He drew a revolver from his pocket. Alicia screamed, but I only laughed and threw up my hands.

“I give in,” I said, “you’ve got me this time. I felt that I was a goner when I heard the woman in the hall.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, amazed.

“I mean that the game’s up with me, this time,” I said, “and I’ve got sense enough to see it. Here, take this. I don’t think you’ll find a cent missing from it.”

I tossed toward him the woman’s purse that I had slipped from the table and into my pocket. Then I heard a sigh and the sound of a fall, that was scarcely a fall, because Alicia merely sank down like one who would sleep, but she had fainted dead away.

I advanced a step toward him, still under the muzzle of his revolver.

“You will find my pistol in my trousers’ right pocket,” I said, “and you can take it with your own hand.”

I spoke the truth. I had learned this habit in my native State, and had confirmed it in the West.

He extended his left hand and took the pistol.

“Well, you are certainly cool enough,” he said, not without some admiration—it came from the knowledge that he had captured one whom he considered so calm, and hence by doing it had exalted himself. I saw, too, that he had begun to believe. He could not help it in the face of the evidence.

“How did you get in?” he asked.

“That is my secret,” I replied cunningly. “When you join our ranks I may tell it to you.”

He glanced at his unconscious wife, half lying against a sofa, and then at me. As I could see by his eye, doubts returned to his mind. “You wear good clothes for a burglar,” he said.

“Why not?” I replied, in a flippant tone. “I’ve earned enough to pay for them.” A slow smile curved his lips, and I saw then his whole cruel nature revealed. The man was unmasked, a selfish, sensuous brute. In that moment of exaltation, in the recoil from my previous baseness, all my thoughts were of Alicia, there on the floor, the victim of such a creature. Glad indeed was I that I could save her now from this last trial

“Well, what are you going to do?” I asked coolly, as if I were tired of waiting.

Still holding the pistol in his hand, he advanced to the table and struck the bell again and again, until sleepy servants rose from beds and the sound of footsteps were heard in the halls.

“Take your mistress,” he cried to two frightened women who came. “And as for you, my gay visitor, we’ll see what you have to say at the police station.”

I saw them lift up Alicia—I thanked God that she had not yet revived—and carry her from the room, her face quite pale, and full of appeal to me in its still pallor, and her long brown hair, that had become unbound, showing gleams of dark red-gold where the blaze of the electric light fell upon it. Poor Alicia! Her fate I could see was worse than mine, and I repeat that however base I may have been I had, at that moment, no thought for myself, but much for her.

Two policemen, called by a servant, came, and making no protest, I went quietly with them to the station.

“I’ll be on hand at your examining trial,” said Grey grimly as I left the house. “Don’t worry for fear that you won’t see me again.”

I made no reply, feeling that I could afford to ignore him, and with my head erect I walked between the two police officers. I was locked in a cell, small and dark, with some bedclothes on an iron bed, and I heard the key turn in the lock that shut me from the world.

I sat long on the edge of the bed, my head in my hands and my thoughts traveling, God knows where, but the body was overpowered at last, and I slept—my first but far from my last night in prison.

►   ▲